[ELI5] What is “nuclear winter?” And if we can cause a winter-like reaction in our atmosphere, could it potentially counter global-warming?
In: Physics
Nuclear winter would occur after a large nuclear war. Basically, the bombs generate a lot of dust and heat, and heat makes smoke – hundreds of cities and forests alike would probably be on fire after a nuclear war. Both dust and smoke rise and block out sunlight.
If there were a nuclear war, the dust and smoke would eventually spread out and create a giant cloud over all of earth high in the atmosphere. We don’t know how thick or dark this cloud would be, but it would reflect some amount of sunlight back into space before it can reach the ground.
This means less heat reaches the surface, lowering temperatures around the world. This would be a “nuclear winter”.
It could backfire if we tried something like this to stop global warming, but people have thought about how it might work. There’s a lot we don’t know, and anything on this scale would need to be studied a lot before we could know what would happen.
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